


Pusher

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [77]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23220766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: There were some monsters Scully wished they hadn’t caught.
Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [77]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/249118
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Pusher

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: "Pusher"  
> A/N: Inktober prompt "catch"  
> Disclaimer: No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

There were some monsters Scully wished they hadn’t caught. Her sentiments about it were nothing like Mulder’s romantic notions, his wistful descriptions of the Jersey Devil fleeing freely through the forest or any of his other fairy tales. But there were cases that took too much of a toll on them. There were beasts that, cornered, lashed out and left wounds that went septic. 

Modell was one of them. He wasn’t even dead and he haunted their thoughts. Scully dreamed she was watching Mulder on the phone with Modell, watching his eyes bulge and his veins cord on his neck like Burst’s had. She was helpless to wrest the phone away. In the better versions of the dream, she broke his fingers in her desperation to end Modell’s spell. In the worst versions, she watched Mulder die as Modell spilled poison into his ear. Mulder was already a tragic figure; he didn’t need to figure in her life as both Hamlet and Hamlet’s ghostly father.

“Talk to me, Scully,” Mulder said sometimes, and she knew that he could still catch the echo of Modell’s whisper. So she talked about nothing, in the car or on the phone or nestled together in their basement lair. She talked about the tea she'd bought that weekend or the book she'd read or the heels she'd considered but hadn't been sure she could run in. She was always thinking of escaping these days. The first thing she looked for in a room was the exit, even at her mother's house.

She hadn’t been the target in Modell’s game of cat and mouse. She hadn’t heard whatever it was in Modell’s voice that ensnared and manipulated. She hadn’t felt the jaws of the trap close around her the way Mulder had. She didn’t know how to extract him. 

She wished Modell had died. She felt badly about that, but not enough to confess it. She kept it to herself when the priest sat listening to her litany. It was selfish, after all, to wish they'd left a person like Modell to prey on the rest of society; it was selfish to wish that this time, someone else would bear the brunt of the killer's claws. But she'd signed up to be the first and last line of defense. She'd joned the Bureau to make a difference. 

Still, when she shed her suit at the end of each weary day and opened her eyes each bleary morning after hunting and being hunted through her dreams, it was hard not to hope for some kind of respite for both of them.


End file.
